I must go down to the seas again

Or 'more DBSA antics' (and apologies are probably owed to John Masefield).  

After my initial outing with the rules proved to be a reasonable success I have been thinking about the issues I had came across.  OK there was nothing major thrown up, and I'm prepared to bet that all my points were considered by Phil Barker and decided against for the sake of keeping the rules simple, but, well you know how I like to bolt on additional chrome.  

The first point was that in the real world damage to a warship has an effect beyond making it easier to sink.  This is either a reduction in combat efficiency or a reduction in speed/manoeuvrability.  Secondly, a crippled ship simply halting feels wrong (inertia and all that) even with fairly long 15 minute game turns some headway would be maintained.  Lastly I think the Hong Kong Wargame Societies idea of having some differences between the capital ships (Cruisers and Battleships) has merit.  This should include both a reflection of different armament, weight of fire in the different shooting arcs. and some reflection of advances in range finding and gunnery technology.  All that said I don't really want to loose the essential simplicity of the rules as conceived by Mr B.

Other players have tried to address some of these issues previously so I'm going to incorporate those ideas where ever possible.  There is a bit of retro-engineering involved in some cases to attempt to understand how their changes were arrived at, but nothing too difficult.  The hardest part will be finding a way to calculate a factor to reflect weight of shot in each firing arc as that will have to be done on a ship by ship basis.  I'm thinking some sort of Excel calculator (you know how I like to play with Excel).

My initial thought is to use some combination of shell weight, rate of fire and perhaps range finder capability, although the latter is problematic.  That would create a number for weight of fire reaching target but wouldn't take into account ability to penetrate armour.  I need to have a bit of a think on this.